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Charles Village

North Charles and 33rd Streets

August 6, 2013

35. School Girls

For the 29th year on this date, Max Obuszewski stands at evening rush hour on North Charles Street, holds up a grainy, blown-up, black-and-white photo of Hiroshima taken shortly after the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” reads the quote from philosopher George Santayana, captioning the photo on Obuszewski’s poster. Two-dozen others, including a mom toting two kids, join the quiet—other than supportive honking horns—annual commemoration. The location near The Johns Hopkins University is meant to simultaneously protest the school’s drone-weapon research and the small event is also an opportunity to highlight the dangers, not just of nuclear weapons, but nuclear power, for example, the ongoing Fukushima radiation leaks.

Still, as Obuszewski glances around at the sparsely attended demonstration, he can’t help but wonder what happened to the anti-war, anti-nuke movement. “I took a bus to New York in June1982 and there were a million people in Central Park for an anti-nuclear demonstration,” he says, with a good-natured laugh. “Where’d everybody go?”

Afterward, demonstrators head to the nearby Friends Meeting House where 81-year-old Setsuko Thurlow shares the horror she witnessed as a 13-year-old Hiroshima schoolgirl: “People walking like ghost-like figures, flesh hanging from their bones, holding their eyeballs in their hands . . . others on the ground, begging for water, stomachs bursting open.”

When she’s finished, Thurlow sits to watch a 15-minute Hiroshima documentary made last year by another schoolgirl, Meher Hans, when she was a Ridgely Middle School eighth-grader. For the project, Hans interviewed Thurlow by phone, but the two are now meeting for the first time as the Hiroshima survivor watches the short film, also for the first time.

In the dark Friends Meeting House basement, Thurlow’s voice suddenly calls out as scenes of the rubbled, desolate city—including a lone stone archway and half-steeple—pan across the screen. “That’s my church!”